Martha Alice Ingham Dickie was born in Providence on April 25, 1905. She was brought up by her aunt and uncle, the Dickies, in a very religious family that belonged to the First Baptist Church in Providence. After attending Hope Street High School, she received a scholarship to Pembroke, where she specialized in languages and fine art. Upon her graduation from Pembroke College in 1926, she attended Northwestern University in Chicago at the Hull House, studying to become a social worker. Dickie married Waitstill Hastings Sharp in 1928, and returned to Boston with her husband where she pursued her third degree at Radcliffe in comparative literature. She had two children. In 1939, Dickie and her husband left their life in Massachusetts to work for the relief effort in Czechoslovakia and France during World War II. She remained dedicated to saving refugees under Nazi occupation, successfully bringing hundreds of people to safety and providing thousands of others with food and relief in the period between 1939 and 1945.